Community-building in a time of crisis

Chartered College of Teaching ¬∑ Community-building in a time of crisis   Perspective can be elusive at times like these. The unprecedented nature and monumental scale of the COVID-19 crisis can blind us to those mundane, minute experiences that are our best guides to action. Take, for example, something that every teacher will have experienced: the process of a child joining a new school. In the UK, this particularly applies to children moving from primary to secondary school. We know that most children worry more about their new school as a social environment than they do about its academic standards. Their psychological need for close, supportive relationships‚Äîfor a sense of 'connectedness' (Resnick et al., 1997) ‚Äî both precedes and shapes children's enthusiasm for learning and their belief in their own capacity to learn. We know that when a school meets these basic psychological needs, students become committed to both its academic goals and to its soci